I've seen lots of HD 4800 and OCed HD 4800 cards being at 80+ degree Celsius at load and still working fine. Overclockers aren't sooo paranoid about temperatures. Pseudo-overclockers are.
Heck even OCed GTX 470 and GTX 480s are working fine for most people.
They do but its always wise to keep temps at check. 480 and 470 were hot cards and that's why nvidia had to work on the cooling department for the 580 and 570.
You don't distinguish overclockers and pseudo overclockers. Its always ones personal take to overclock a chip. Manufacturers don't push a user to overclock a product. Its done totally at ones own risk.
And running at 80% fixed fan speed will deteriorate fan life without warning and can risk gpu overheating. So its also wise to set fan profile for specific temps so that when temps increase, fan speeds are gradually stepped up automatically. Anybody arguing on this fact can always try practically and face consequences. At 80% + constant fan speed, the noise also increases severely and i have personally tested it in my card and
cilus's 6870. The noise is intolerable and you can actually feel the fan giving in.
Personally i don't recommend anybody to push a reference 6950 to higher limits just for fun. Its a pretty powerful card at stock and doesn't need to be pushed.
If anybody wants to push a 6950, he/she can spend 1k and get a non-reference card like the TF 2 and TF 3 power edition. Those handle heat better.
But still anybody pushing a reference 6950 can do it but completely at the user's risk. I personally recommend pushing a reference 6950 to 50 mhz level to keep temperatures at check. Anything over that is bad for the longevity of the card imo because heat always reduces efficiency of any microprocessor cpu or gpu.
Its totally a generic statement.